ICE MEETS CLOTH

The Leafs? brass finally succumbed to the wishes of its male-dominant fan base and its carnal-fuelled ? albeit subliminal ? lustings for seeing young, curvy women in tight clothing by debuting the all-female ice crew team. The Leafs, traditional to the core having shunned for generations the kind of gimmickry trotted out by other organizations, have held out for many years until now. But, finally, the Leafs chose to resist no more and joined a long list of other NHL teams when on March 8th, 2014, the organization inevitably acceded to these red-blooded, testosterone-driven fans and their hetero-inspired desires. It?s no secret men love to ogle the ladies and the fan experience can only be bolstered by this move.

The job of these girls is pretty simple: skate up and down the length of the Air Canada Centre ice surface between occasional stoppages in play, with shovel in hand, as they let the wind toss their long hair while sweeping up the snow kicked up by the aggressive hockey-playing habits of the men who tenaciously dig their blades into the hard ice while playing the good ol? hockey game. Well, there is more. As they skate, the girls? posture can go a long way to drawing attention to themselves, which is exactly why they gently lean forward, knees bent and the posterior part of their anatomies paraded about in true Kardashian fashion as they stride up and down the ice. This is after all why these girls have been called upon to replace an erstwhile team of stodgy, unshapely, and all-around uninteresting men whose business-like routine of sweeping the ice, while efficient, was so sterile that it captured the attention of precisely no one and aroused even fewer. Sorry guys. Maybe the Leafs? on-ice product wasn?t enough to leave the fans sated, but one thing that rarely fails to turn the heads of a gathering of virile spectators is a bunch of young women who are, in layman?s parlance, hot and awesome.

One such member of the ice-crew girls ? indeed, the one who shepherds the entire team onto the ice ? may have been a little overly anxious on this night in her haste to start the next sweep. Who knows, maybe the nerves around this much-awaited debut got to her. Maybe it was something else. At any rate, she stepped onto the ice and wasted no time wiping out three times to a loud chorus of “Ooooohh”s from the crowd of 19,000 strong. Each time, she would get up, try to skate, and fall again until it dawned on her that one of her skate blades was not coming into the cleanest contact with the ice. Uh-huh, that?s right: her skate protector was still . . . on . . . her . . . skate. Oh boy. Everyone exploded. Hockey crowds in general, and Leaf fans in particular, are the wrong type of people to turn to if you?re expecting an expression of sympathy to pour down on you after bringing something slightly less than your A game to the table. They spare no one.

The buzz was palpable and proved too much to bear forcing our embarrassed heroine to turn away from the ice and head back inside the tunnel ? no doubt red-faced ? as the rest of the ice crew girls skated out to do their sweep, minus their distraught leader.